Backbone Fund: how can we contribute to a more equitable voluntary sector?

We have renewed the purpose and scope of our Backbone Fund over the last year following the evaluation of the Fund in 2022. We took time to examine the role of Backbone and what contribution we would like it to make. In listening to the feedback from the organisations we support, we felt it important to keep the fund as non-restricted core funding, for a 5‑year period. We have taken a closer look at how our processes can be more transparent and how we can ensure our decision-making is based on principles of equity and justice.

The renewed Backbone Fund will enable us to contribute towards strengthening civil society as a whole. One that is future focused and seeks to build collective strength. We want to bring to the fore those infrastructure bodies who have been under-served/under-represented (Booska Paper, Ubele Initiative).

The Backbone Fund is part of our commitment to support civil society leaders. We want to give leaders the space to think long term, to listen, and to steer the organisation with purpose. We have been intentional in partnering with organisations where equity is visible in everything they do and who they are. We are thinking as much about the way organisations work and their values as the fields they work in.

We want to support organisations who have compelling ideas of how to bring about change. Organisations that commit to learning and share what they’ve learned to drive wider change. The Fund will support organisations that bring other organisations and communities together. It will provide support and strengthen their collective voice and impact.

Over the course of nine months, a cross-department group worked iteratively on reviewing the Fund. We started off with the evaluation of the programme by Nexus Evaluation that was informed by 24 Backbone-funded organisations. Questions such as – What is needed now? At what stage in an organisation’s lifecycle are we best placed to support? How do we identify organisations whose work is rooted in and authentically connected to anti-oppression work?

We took time to research infrastructure funds, spoke with other funders and took learnings from colleagues such as the Infrastructure Support in the Youth Sector. As a group we considered the big operational questions – how to engage advisors, the role they might play in steering the direction of the fund, we interrogated questions such as length of fund, open or closed, size and reach of organisation.

In the 2024 cohort, we have explicitly focused on organisations promoting equity and racial justice as the evaluation identifies gaps in the current portfolio. This theme runs through the portfolio and in particular Black Equity Organisation and the Kinfolk Network.

We have also looked for organisations working to shift the bigger economic/​financial system (in the context of climate change and justice in particular), a crucial underpinning context for all our work. Positive Money and Good Ancestor Movement will join ShareAction in the portfolio which starts to give some breadth to this area and increases the influencing capacity.

We are also trying to strengthen engagement with strategic litigation and the framework for maintaining high standards in public life, because this is something the organisations we support are telling us they are concerned about as well as an area which has had some success in pushing back against anti-democratic tendencies. The Campaign for Freedom of Information and Systemic Justice are in this arena.

Continuing our focus on the position of children and young people in society, School of International Futures focuses on the underpinning policy structures that enable young people now and in the future to be heard within policy structures. The Alliance for Youth Justice has been funded by our Youth Fund in the past and it particularly supports young people caught up in the criminal justice system. This grant will focus on supporting the Alliance in its role as a backbone organisation.

360Giving play a critical role in holding funders to account and enabling greater strategic working and transparency. For example, the recent Funding Justice 2 report highlighted the relative lack of investment in this area and relied on their data.

The Fund will continue to evolve over time – with internal and external input – as will our ongoing work to centre anti-oppressive, anti-racist practice. As part of our review, we also considered whether open applications or applications by invitation only would better serve the aims of the fund. Given the limited size of the fund and relatively small numbers of grants given, we rely on inviting applicants pooled from our existing networks. We acknowledge that even with these extensive networks, we do not have the full picture of the voluntary landscape and so welcome enquiries to the Backbone Fund if it sounds aligned with your organisation: backbonefund@phf.org.uk